Roughly fifteen years into his remarkable, unsleeping, virtually daily, nearly fifteen-year-old anonymous campaign of defamation and character assassination against me, my Malevolent Stalker has declared that the only genuine way in which I can demonstrate that I don’t accompany these tours for the money that I earn from them — naïvely, I had imagined that the fact that I earn no money from them might suffice on that score — would be to prove that I accompany them entirely at my own expense.
That’s not likely to happen. Notwithstanding the many millions that I earn each year from apologetics, I’m simply not wealthy enough for such a demonstration of virtue.
I’m the same kind of pathetic loser who, when invited to grill burgers for a neighborhood gathering of roughly two hundred, might timidly agree to do it if the group inviting him will cover the cost of the ground beef.
I’m just not in the class who can say “Anytime you’d like to me to take you around Egypt or Israel or the Alps, or to accompany you on a Mediterranean cruise, just say the word and I’ll be there at my own expense!”
Greedy me.
Exploring another possible avenue of attack, one of the Malevolent Stalker’s anonymous online colleagues notes that I’m overseas and not teaching. Implicitly, he suggests, I must be defrauding Brigham Young University and ripping off the tithe payers.
Well. Most people who’ve attended school at whatever level (in the United States, at least) will have noticed that the academic calendar follows a certain rhythm — probably set, originally, by the seasons of seedtime and harvest and, therefore, a bit obsolete these days. But the tradition remains.
And, among other things, it yields what are known among specialists as “summer vacations.” At Brigham Young University, we have Fall and Winter terms, and the summer is divided into short Spring and Summer terms. No full-time faculty members at BYU, to the best of my knowledge, teach during every one of those terms. They’re not even permitted to teach during all of those terms.
So, alas, I’m not guilty of the kind of crime against BYU and the Latter-day Saints of which this particular critic would like me to be. And, for me, regular visits to the Middle East are something like a chemist’s regular visits to his laboratory. They recharge my batteries. After all, I teach about the Middle East. Seeing Israel, Egypt, and Jordan on a regular basis, talking to Middle Easterners, and so forth is helpful to me and, I think, indirectly to my students.
Posted from Tiberias, Israel
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